


Sleepwalking in the Land of Magnets and Memories

by Smilla



Category: Supernatural
Genre: 2007, Case Fic, Challenge: Summergen, Dealfic, Gen, Post Season 2
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-06-05
Updated: 2010-06-05
Packaged: 2017-10-09 22:38:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,172
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/92347
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Smilla/pseuds/Smilla
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sam hit Dean sixteen weeks after southern Wyoming.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sleepwalking in the Land of Magnets and Memories

**Author's Note:**

> See notes at the [original post](http://smilla02.livejournal.com/84177.html).

_the most prolific period of pessimism   
comes at twenty-one or thereabouts   
when the first attempt is made   
to translate dreams into reality _

\- Heywood Broun

 

Sam hit Dean sixteen weeks after southern Wyoming.

A motel room, forty-seven miles north of Sioux Falls, Sam awoke, short of breath and heart counting fast-escaping seconds with every loud thump.

Short run for the bathroom while bile and beer climbed up in his mouth, caught himself on the edge of Dean's bed with a choked curse, mouth clamped so he didn't spill any scream or vomit. But he jarred Dean's bed, made the possibility of escaping his brother's scrutiny equal to zero.

The door shut with a hollow bang on Dean's sleep-confused face.

He spent hours inside, the light grey and spilling from the high-ceiling window. More than once, he wished he'd brought his pillow or a sheet to put as barrier between his skin and the dirty floor. Wouldn't have minded some padding for the rattling of his bones against the tiles, some fucking barrier between the porcelain and his right elbow. The floor was icy cold and slick with his sweat, with water spilled on the floor from the shower.

For hours Sam sat, inert on a dirty floor, in a motel forty-seven miles north of Sioux Falls, shivering while counting the constellation of dirty spots on the bathmat. He felt yellow, like the old crust in the bottom of the toilet. Used-up.

Outside, behind the door, Dean was a steady flow of words.

Pleas gave way to threats; threats gave way to curses. Expletives he voiced loudly at first and softly after some time. So softly Sam couldn't hear them anymore, only the pleading tone of them, under the harsh vowels.

_Fuck you, Sammy,_ came through loud and clear, though.

After, when the light made the dirtiest corner of the room perfectly clear; when the sun cut rectangles of gold light across the sink and the small mirror, Sam knew it was way into morning. He stood up, cramped legs and stomach, and left the room with a background of water draining down the pipes and a sour taste in the back of his mouth. The door opened on Dean's pale face, on those dark spots scattered around his cheekbones and nose. Dean's left hand was hanging mid-air from where it was resting against the wood, shadowed eyes daring Sam to talk, mouth curving slowly, surely. A smirk.

Sam hit Dean on the first word of whatever he was going to say. A jab between nose and cheek that rippled gently through his hand and forearm, left a vague imprint of bone against his knuckles.

Dean's head snapped back. Blood, red and thick, sluggishly trickled from Dean's nose and dripped on his mouth with the next exhalation of breath. A spray of red. Dean shook his head; smiled, didn't look up. Wiped the blood with the back of his hand and it smeared in pinkish blotches up to his ear.

"You done?" he said. "'Cause if you're done, we have work to do in Illinois." Packed them both in record time, circling carefully around Sam.

Sam, for his part, stood quietly, not quite believing how moronic his brother could be, or himself, for that matter.

Sam stood still, rigid as a mannequin in the middle of the room.

-*-

Dean dreams. Warm beach under his feet, thrilled laughs in the distance. Sam's long-limbed and languid under the sun, a flare of red on his nose, his cheeks, a book resting askew on his chest. Dean plays with the sand, tries to keep it inside his fist, but it slides slowly on the ground.

The water too, it slides quietly, along his legs and chest and muscles and his weariness. Takes him far away, where the sky and the water have the same color. Far away, and Sam and Dad are on the white banks, building a castle of sand with hard ridged turrets but without sentinels to ward off the night.

-*-

Dean drove them all the way into Illinois, ten hours straight. The road headed south into Iowa and Missouri, it skimmed the border of Kansas before bending east, cutting the entire length of Missouri towards Illinois; on the edge of his birth state, Sam felt a single heartbeat missing its tempo.

South Illinois was a flat landscape of little squares of green, and geometrical fields blending far away into the horizon. Music filled a charged silence and in between the songs, the air whooshed softly through the windshields. They saw farms and minuscule towns composed of a church, a long one-storey building. Completed by a bar, or a diner or a café, unequivocally similar to each other.

Rain stopped a couple of miles outside St. Louis. Sam saw the city disappear in a cloud of fine mist in the rearview mirror. Dean drove them east, against the wind and outside the storm where the road shone wet and silvery, and the puddles of dirty water in the potholes mirrored a clear sky.

Air still, crystalline; smelling of the fresh memory of rain and a sharp scent of overturned earth, calming and pleasing; so hopeful that Sam had to close his eyes for a moment.

Sam talked for the first time in hours.

"So it's a water demon?"

"Maybe."

"Knucker."

"… Nohk."

"Nix."

"Same thing."

"A kappa?"

"What the hell would a Japanese demon do in the middle of nowhere-Illinois?"

Sam shrugged noncommittally, looked at Dean, sucking in a breath. "Dude, aren't Kappas the frog-dudes that eat your gut through your ass--"

"Thanks for the nice image, dickhead!" But there was disgust mirroring his own in Dean's eyes, and Dean's retort lacked any humor. Sam recognized it for what it was: a willingness to set things moderately straight between them, and Sam deflated, feeling disarmed, rage as useless as the silent thoughts crowding his head.

Silence fell again, but not as heavy as before, the shift barely visible in Dean's posture; legs open and back slouched low in the seat.

"What about coffee?" Dean asked after the Impala ate more miles, pointed with his chin to a sign hanging crookedly on the edge of the road. An odd one, yellow-old -- vintage, Sam objected -- announcing with slanted down letters the best coffee in the world.

-*-

They stopped at the _Pow-Wow Trading Post Motel_ for the night, three miles east of Hillsboro, Illinois. Acres and acres of corn surrounding them like a green sea, waving lazily in the breeze in a constant impression of movement.

The place went straight to the top of the ugliest places they had ever slept in. Dean looked around with some sort of perverse satisfaction, a grin to Sam's wince. There were lassos hanging on the walls, a mechanical bull stood in front of the entrance, the leather soft and gleaming in the spot where countless hands had touched it.

They secured a room facing north-east, and in the mid-afternoon the only sound they could hear besides the occasional roar of passing cars far away was the wind weaving notes in the field of corn. It was nice and Sam sat on the rocking chair outside their room, laptop balanced on his knees. Dean unloaded the car with exaggerated huffing and puffing, and feigned affront at Sam's laziness.

Sam had to smile at Dean's tactics, at how childish he got, believing that clowning around was all it took to make things straight. Like Sam was five, and that thought was enough to smarten Sam up. All things considered, it would be good if things were as simple as that.

Dean went to the little store of the motel, where apparently the "trading" part of the _Pow-Wow Trading Post Motel_ happened, and Sam watched him go, watched the way Dean walked, like he owned the place and the air in it. The space accommodated Dean Winchester's passage. Sam came to the conclusion that he was as in awe of his brother as when he was five years old.

-*-

Dean dreams. He walks on hard-packed earth, dry. Cracked. Broken by the sun. He looks around, sees flowers pushing forcefully against the cracks in the earth. Stems slender, green against the ochre terrain. Fragile, thin.

Women with coltish limbs and heavy breasts, dark aureoles and hair waving in the breeze come from the north. He fucks them, all. Forceful thrust of his loins, then straight to the next. Hurried, barely any pleasure at all. The need hurts, an ache so low and deep he can't quench.

The women change, after, blossom into flowers under the unforgiving sun.

-*-

Morning brought the news of a new victim. Another child, life snuffed out the day before, probably at the same time as they were crossing the border into Illinois. The boy was seven years old.

Dean swore, and stalked to the car without another word.

They went to the mortuary. Always their first stop.

In the Sunday afternoon sun, the streets were quiet, solitary. Dean stood at his back while Sam picked the lock, getting lost in the mechanics of it: he pushed and something irrevocably yielded. He closed his eyes when he twisted the lock pick, strained his senses toward the soft click of the bolt unlatching. Actions and reactions that he could control. It felt good.

Dean behind him, knees almost touching Sam's back, stood still and silent, face almost completely obscured by the shadow cast by the wall so that Sam couldn't tell what was in his eyes.

They went inside where the sun couldn't reach them; it was cool and dark and lifeless.

Sam had seen his share of bodies; mangled, bitten, torn to pieces. He gagged at the smell of rotten water that clung to the body, a little bundle under a white sheet. Drowned victims were the worst, with their swollen faces, and abdomens ready to burst with gas. Not this. Not this. The child, the body, it was flat, deflated, sucked dry of organs and blood. Pathetic. Piteous rag-doll without its stuffing.

Sam hoped nobody was showing the boy's body to his mother.

-*-

She was already crazy when they met her.

She sat rocking slightly in her chair, back and forth, a movement barely visible. Light stopping at her feet as if her grief used all the space, left no room for anything else.

She said she didn't lose sight of him for more than a minute. She said, _he was there, right besides me._ She said, _he was there, right beside me. He knows he's not supposed to wander away._

She lost focus with those words, eyes getting a far away quality to them like she was listening to mysterious voices, distant, and ones only she could hear. _He's my boy_, she said. _He knows he's not supposed to wander away_.

It had been a bad idea coming here.

Dean stood pale in a corner of the room, as far as he could from Sam and the woman, tense and pale and Sam startled when he recognized in Dean's eyes the same crazed look the woman had.

It was hard hanging onto the anger, the rage at Dean's choices. Sam had never asked Dean how it was when he was… dead. The memory of Dean after Dad was too recent, too painful. He'd only seen Dean's relief, felt the force of it in his arms when he'd hugged him and only because it had hurt.

Sam hadn't known he was supposed to look for something else then, his own feelings a jumbled mass he couldn't disentangle: too many threads he had to follow, and a big black hole made of nothingness in between death and resurrection.

Sam felt the walls closing on him, the force of the things he had to do suffocating. That impetuous urge to just do something came with traitorous speed; hit him out of nowhere.

Dean's expression thawed, followed him outside where the air was September-fresh, but even when they left the mourning house, that doleful aura of grief followed him, clung on his skin like a soaked shirt.

Dean walked faster, almost at a run, sight straight ahead.

The neighborhood was clean, with the perfect little houses and the trimmed front yards. Hope in them so fragile it hurt.

There was a single open bar and they spent the rest of the night in it. It was dark anyway, and not the kind of dark that served them well.

Earlier, on his second beer, Sam blew out a sigh, heavy and layered enough that Dean had to look up at him. Sam bowed, leveled himself to Dean's ear and whispered in it, like it was a secret, "I'm not sorry for hitting you."

Dean nodded, fingers going reflexively to the bruise on his face. "Okay," he said. "It's okay. I'm not apologizing either."

-*-

Dean dreams. And the dream has the wispy quality of a wish, of her warm smile, the weight of her hand against his cheek. Sam, Sammy, Sam. He put that look on her face. She lets him touch his tiny hands, the fragile fingers, and he strokes the skin of his little arm, feels the silky quality of it.

Sam's hand disappears inside his own, walking, following the large shoulders of Dad, the invisible path inside the wood where the sun filters slanted trough the branches and shadows moves dark and menacing in each corners.

Sam grows until he's tall, taller, tallest. But strangely enough, his hand is never too big that Dean can't cover it with his own.

-*-

Squares of bright blue sky ripped through the clouds, and the air was sharp and clean and smelling of earth. When Sam told Dean how to get rid of _kappas_, Dean laughed long and hard, sound bouncing off crazily on the roof of the car. A creepy sound, and Sam shivered.

"They think it's something in the water."

"Uh, what?"

"People, they think it's the minerals from the mines."

"Bullshit."

A long time ago, Sam learned that people wouldn't have their beliefs challenged more than the beer they drank or the shows they watched. Would rather put locks on the doors and pray it was enough to keep the dark outside. He'd been one of them after all. Burying the knowledge deeply and putting locks on all his doors, hoping the dark would never find him again. But it'd found Jess, and it had found Dad. And later it had found him.

Dean's snort was incredulous, "Okay, let's fuck this fucker," he said. Changed gear with a flick of his hand so the car gained speed exponentially, smoothly.

The spot where the children had gone missing was a bend in the south part of _Lake Lou Yaeger_, secluded from the most frequented places, the marinas, the beaches, screened by a thick vegetation. It would have been a nice spot, but it was eerily quiet and the silence was absolute, shiver-inducing.

Their plan was vague: lure it out of the water, weaken it, kill it. And for once Sam had not protested, had not questioned it: _kappas_ would go for children, but not necessarily and not exclusively and Sam knew it would show itself to them.

They didn't even have to wait long. It rose from the water, human in form, grey skin wet and glistening into the sun, muscles flexing, jade eyes dark and hooded. Luminescent irises of slimy green and an appetite for flesh in its pointy teeth; a folk tale invented to scare children off from lakes and rivers and ponds. Something born from good intentions, and the irony of it didn't escape Sam: the idea twisted around, inhabited by malevolent intentions.

Sam bowed deeply like he'd planned, and the _kappa_ bowed too, reluctant, even if doing so meant that the power-giving water spilled on the ground in a small cascade. Demons, he knew, were bound by rules as much as hunters were. Made their job harder and easier at the same time.

Even weakened, the _kappa_ managed to bury its claws in the meaty part of Dean's thigh when he stumbled on a tree root. Just a matter of chance: Dean rolled left instead of right while falling, totally casual, and Sam heard the denim ripping when those razor-nails found purchase, saw the blood gushing red when they found flesh. It was quite possible that he lost it a bit then, because there was no way that he could strike the makeshift torch so deep in the scaled chest of the Kappa, deep between what felt like ribs but were gills. Sam thrust hard and the torch went through it, emerged from his back.

Sam watched it burn, watched as it shirked back into a gelatinous mass on the banks, greener against the lively color of the grass. And everything was so quiet for a moment, that Sam wondered if perhaps time had stopped and they were stuck forever on that single act of violence. On that single act of vengeance.

It was a matter of minutes after; Sam helped Dean to stand while avoiding gagging on the sickening smell of dead fish coming from the ground. Dean was pliant in his hands, made no sounds even hurting like he was, and Sam caught a surprising weariness in his brother, a whiff in the wind, gone before he could recognize the scent.

The Impala was not far and when Sam looked in the rearview mirror there was no trace left of their passage. Only the ripple of calm water and the birds flying randomly between the trees.

The demon had killed four children, one for each month since south Wyoming. No matter how Sam looked at it, it didn't feel like victory.

-*-

Dean dreams. Of stars shining far away. _It's the only past you can really hang on to._ Sam tells him. The car is sun warmed against his back and the summer night is buzzing with life.

Those little dots of light on the pitch dark sky. Nuclear explosion of atoms and matter, white light swirling around with psychedelic force. It happened thousand of years ago.

Brief explosions of fire, sun fires. Stardust is all that's left after, but Dean, from his disadvantaged point thousand years in the future, will never see it: the void space a sun leaves behind after it implodes.

_I wasn't hanging onto the past,_ he tells Sam.

-*-

Dean was playing with Sam's laptop, turned fever-bright eyes to Sam coming through the door. "Look at this," he said, "_Wash your demons down._" He read loudly, went on about some company selling bottled holy water. "It's blessed by two members of the clergy, you know? Double protection, they say, or some shit like that--"

Sam exhaled, looked at Dean's bright eyes. He'd have to check Dean's wound later, look for signs of infection. Dean had bled so much; the blood had painted his hands, the carpet, the floor. The edges of the gouges were mangled and torn, only inches away from the main artery. Sam had been drenched in sweat after he'd stitched the wound closed; it would scar and Dean had been indifferent to it in a way that had made Sam want to hit him again.

He set dinner on the nightstand closer to Dean's bed, wiped his fingers on the front of his jeans, slick from the grease bleeding through the paper bag.

They ate fast, silence all around: inside their room and outside, like they'd been swallowed whole, sucked inside a vacuum, universe big and black and stars shiny and brilliant without the moon. Sam tensely poked at a hole in his jeans, loose threads catching in the abraded skin of his fingers.

Sam stood, produced the bottle of Jack he'd been hiding until he'd made up his mind. Dean beamed, smiling large and happily, and it shouldn't please Sam so much. He was planning on getting them wasted, for chrissake, shouldn't even think about it with Dean on antibiotics and painkillers. Didn't know why he craved the alcohol. All he wanted to do was to sleep, for Dean to rest so they'd hit the road in the morning.

Instead, he found two glasses in the cupboards washed them with Dean's shampoo and wiped them dry with one of his undershirts, and then put them on the bedpost. He put the tiny trashcan near the door, dared Dean to hit it with the beer bottles' caps he'd collected during their stay. A habit he'd never grown out since… since when he'd had his first beer.

"Okay," Dean said. Laughed. "I won't start betting until you're two drinks in."

"And you win only if you make them jingle against each other."

Dean made clear how stupid he thought the game was, and Sam wanted to tell Dean that they were playing what would pass for a modern version of an ancient drinking game, actually. Wanted to tell Dean that warriors of high rank had played it drinking bright red wine from golden chalices, maybe the bit about those voluptuous maidens pouring it would interest him. But four rounds later Sam had slouched low in his chair, feeling loose and unravelled, like he was spilling out of his skin and melting into the fake leather of the chair.

Sam wondered idly if Dean was feeling as loose as Sam was, if it was the same anxious awareness of time that turned Dean's gaze unfocused when he downed his fifth shot. He sloshed the whiskey in his mouth when he threw the lid, too much force and he missed the bin by a good four inches. Dean's first miss.

"Dean…" Sam said and Dean hummed, a vibrating note low in his chest, tight indifference on his face, freakishly attuned to Sam's changes of moods in a way that drove Sam crazy. It was the whiskey talking, he had no other excuse for bringing it up, not when the air was light with something akin to peacefulness, with the unique brand of Winchester-happiness.

"You look almost happy, Dean." Which wasn't exactly true but he'd been having a hard time coming up with the right word for it, for what Dean was doing; fucking, drinking, hunting, _living_ and expecting Sam to live like nothing had changed and nothing was going to change. Stalling in a fake Old West room for two nights when all Sam wanted to do was _doing_. Moving. Keep looking.

Dean snorted, started talking but fell into silence; stared at Sam with such an earnest look, and Sam remembered why he'd not spoken yet. Why their silent agreement of never openly talking about it had felt right. Why he'd hung onto his rage but let Dean find jobs, so they could make a dent in the overwhelming number of demons roaming the world after Wyoming. Why each call to Bobby had been done in secret, each lack of answer triggering disappointment and _fear-panic-fear_, but he'd worked through it alone so that Dean didn't see it.

He felt sorry for speaking and immediately gave up on getting an answer, didn't want it, afraid and ashamed because he should own the answers to his questions.

But apparently there was no predicting when Dean would actually talk.

"Don't make me hope," Dean said, so softly and surely Sam hadn't been hearing him right. Dean cleared his throat, hand coming up to stop Sam from talking, and he wasn't, he wasn't -- could not –

Dean stopped, the silence between them complete, and Sam heard the breeze picking up outside.

"Don't make me hope, Sammy, I can't…"

Sam hated that his eyes burned so sharply and so suddenly. He'd decided four months ago that he would deny nothing to Dean. But this, this was all he could offer and he couldn't accept. Not a countdown. No.

"Just in case Bobby asks," Dean said after a while. "I've shipped to his place the deluxe package. Holy water, recycled-glass bottles with the silver cross on the cap, a twelve pack."

Sam stilled, eyes feeling too big for his face, gritty and aching, pain going up in the centre of his head, and hands too large to stop the flow of tears. And when he realized what Dean was talking about, he laughed, but the shaky breathiness of it was out in the air, exposed and impossible to hide.

Dean looked back at him, grinning a fool's grin, he shifted awkwardly and clumsily, didn't find purchase to ease the pressure off his leg and ended hitting the headboard with the underside of his hand.

Sam took pity of him, sight still blurred and stumbling with too much booze. Gave Dean the spare pillow from his own bed. Took his weight so Dean could lie straight on the bed.

Maybe it was the alcohol running in his bloodstream, the temporary energy coming from it that wiped out the exhaustion. The fear coiled tightly, imprinted deep into his bones like a hidden trademark. But he found that he could bear Dean's weight.

Bear all his weight.

\--


End file.
